The American patent system is based on what Gar Alperovitz calls "the hero inventor" ideology, the belief that one man or woman working diligently and independently on a project drives innovation by upending the status quo.

I don't think it's that at all. I think the problem is a deliberately overworked and underfunded Patent Office that doesn't have the time to read patent applications that are deliberately written in a confusing, complicated way and so they end up granting overly broad patents. The intent is to stifle competition but every once in a while, one of these overly-broad patents comes back to bite a big company in the ass.

Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Baron Harkonnen:Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Reading Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs makes it sound like they succeeded as much despite him as because of him. Take the iPhone 4, for example: Jobs insisted on having a metal band around its edges, which the engineers (rightfully) told him was a bad idea, because it would block radio signals. He only budged enough to allow some openings to be put in that metal band, which then led to a problem where you could easily block that opening with your finger as you hold it and lose signal strength, sometimes enough to drop calls. and then when that was questioned later, he gave his infamous "You're holding it wrong" response, which would have gotten any frontline iPhone support agent fired. And there's much more like that, like the way his design demands made the original Macintosh far more expensive and underpowered (even by the standards of the day) than it should have been.

It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days.

Bashar and Asma's Infinite Playlist:jake_lex: It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days

Well they've moved from a phone where your hand can block calls to a phone where your hand can bend the aluminum casing through normal use, so I'm not sure if they're moving in the right direction.

This is the first time I've heard that the aluminum casing having a bending problem.Citation please?

Abe Vigoda's Ghost:Bashar and Asma's Infinite Playlist: jake_lex: It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days

Well they've moved from a phone where your hand can block calls to a phone where your hand can bend the aluminum casing through normal use, so I'm not sure if they're moving in the right direction.

This is the first time I've heard that the aluminum casing having a bending problem.Citation please?

I'm surprised you ask this after publicly acknowledging you work full time for Samsung as a threadshiater.

/I guess that easy six figure salary keeps you busy with the toys that daddy refuses to buy, like that chrome-painted BMW.

It really was although the patent system does tend to be a pretty dry subject. I have to admit the articles implied "Steve Jobs was a patent troll" thing is probably going to pay for Salon's hosting this month.

digistil:Abe Vigoda's Ghost: Bashar and Asma's Infinite Playlist: jake_lex: It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days

Well they've moved from a phone where your hand can block calls to a phone where your hand can bend the aluminum casing through normal use, so I'm not sure if they're moving in the right direction.

This is the first time I've heard that the aluminum casing having a bending problem.Citation please?

I'm surprised you ask this after publicly acknowledging you work full time for Samsung as a threadshiater.

/I guess that easy six figure salary keeps you busy with the toys that daddy refuses to buy, like that chrome-painted BMW.

van1ty:"Innovators, in addition to standing up on the shoulders of giants, rarely work alone. Innovators often rely on massive funding by corporations like Bell Laboratories, "

I don't claim to know much about this sort of thing, but would corporations provide this kind of funding if they weren't rewarded with patent protection in the end?

As an engineer in the corporate world with a number of patents. I'd say that the answer to your question is that yes, they would still fund development efforts just as much as they currently do.

Development is done primarily to provide your customer with a product that the competition does not have. Getting exclusive rights (excluding the competitor from providing the same product) is a bonus that comes after the fact.

Patent litigation is a royal PITA that pretty much consumes all the profit that any innovation produces. So to some extent, some new products do not get to market for fear that the competition will sue. Any new product comes with up-front costs for tooling and advertising. If the patent attorney cluck-clucks about the possibility of a lawsuit, the company will not invest that up-front money and the product will never see the light of day.

`Marconi' invented the radio - I've heard that all of my life. What most don't know is that his idea was based on 17 patents by Tesla. Most of todays technology is based on this guys inventions, patents and ideas.

Patent trolls need to be reigned in. It's like domain parking. No website, no valid claim to the domain. No product, no valid claim to the patent. these companies spring up that buy these patents up and sit on them, then sue other companies for settlements.

Baron Harkonnen:There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Based on Walter Isaacson's bio, Jobs was nothing more than a combination of a sociopath, good salesman and motivator. Also not very bright when his health or family was concerned. His cancer was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer but he chose to wait for a year and see if eating large quantities of fruit (which probably caused his condition in the first place) and "alternative medicine" will cure him. That decision almost certainly killed him.

TappingTheVein:Baron Harkonnen: There's a fine line between genius and insanity. It's interesting how many great innovators stand on both sides.

Based on Walter Isaacson's bio, Jobs was nothing more than a combination of a sociopath, good salesman and motivator. Also not very bright when his health or family was concerned. His cancer was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer but he chose to wait for a year and see if eating large quantities of fruit (which probably caused his condition in the first place) and "alternative medicine" will cure him. That decision almost certainly killed him.

He was an artist, but instead of technical skills with brush or pen he had skills with people and sales. He would have ideas but need others with skill to realize them.

As for alternative medicine, there was also the political aspect. He stayed on a poor people waiting list and held off coontil later and more desperate) on using the American Aristocrat system.

Abe Vigoda's Ghost:Bashar and Asma's Infinite Playlist: jake_lex: It's kind of interesting to think about, with all the "Apple is doooooooooooooooooooooomed without Steve Jobs!" trolls that seem to infest the tech press these days

Well they've moved from a phone where your hand can block calls to a phone where your hand can bend the aluminum casing through normal use, so I'm not sure if they're moving in the right direction.

This is the first time I've heard that the aluminum casing having a bending problem.Citation please?

If you google it, there are a bunch of reports and articles of the case bending.

I only know about it because I had to return my new one the other week because it started warping at the volume key.

TheBigJerk:He was an artist, but instead of technical skills with brush or pen he had skills with people and sales. He would have ideas but need others with skill to realize them

Yes, a good salesman and motivator. Like i said.

TheBigJerk:As for alternative medicine, there was also the political aspect. He stayed on a poor people waiting list and held off coontil later and more desperate) on using the American Aristocrat system.

Or so I'm told.

No, he refuse to do the operation that would save his life long before there was a need for a transplant. There was no political aspect. He reached the desperate level of transplant because he was too stubborn, stupid or both to begin treatment the moment he was diagnosed with a very rare treatble form of cancer and opted to wait a year (!) and try eating fruits instead. This incredibly bad decision was what probably killed him.

Baron Harkonnen : Steve Jobs was a great American entrepreneur who also thought that drinking more fruit juice would cure his pancreatic cancer holistically; cancer that was almost certainly caused by decades of a fruit and nut diet that pushed his pancreas past the breaking point.

You left out the part where he gamed the US organ transplant system to steal a liver from hundreds of other (non-rich) people actually interested in getting real medical care.

Steve Jobs may well have embodied the American Dream, but in a way that makes that not even remotely a compliment.

MabalzIzari:`Marconi' invented the radio - I've heard that all of my life. What most don't know is that his idea was based on 17 patents by Tesla. Most of todays technology is based on this guys inventions, patents and ideas.

That's a particuarly good example. Marconi was a much, MUCH better businessman than Tesla, and it's not widely known but many of Marconi's patents were voided in favor of Tesla - although that came too late for Tesla himself who died penniless.

Tesla was an unstable genius and they still talk about the night he blew up the Colorado Springs public power plant.

The line "We stand on the shoulders of Giants" was from Issac Newton, From Wikipedia:

If I have seen further it is by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants">s tanding on ye sholders of Giants.Letter to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke">Robert Hooke (15 February 1676) [dated as 5 February 1675 using the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar">Julian calendar with March 25th rather than January 1st as New Years Day, equivalent to 15 February 1676 by Gregorian reckonings.] The phrase is most famous as an expression of Newton's but he was using a simile which in its earliest known form was attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Chartres">Bernard of Chartres by http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_of_Salisbury">John of Salisbury: Bernard of Chartres used to say that we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter. And this is not at all because of the acuteness of our sight or the stature of our body, but because we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants.